A lot of us with programming skills tend towards indicators and/or automated strategies in utilising our skills.
Still - I've yet to meet a person who's made money out of either. So - are these skills of use and are there better ways to leverage them?
I think there are better ways and I think one of the ways to use these skills is in gathering statistics. Still, even that's not so simple as it sounds.
For instance - let's take a common reversal on the ES. A reversal at yesterdays high. This seems pretty easy to program - but...
How do you qualify as a reversal at the high?
- How many ticks prior to the high will you look for a reversal?
- How many ticks after the high will you look for a reversal?
How do we know a reversal was succesful or not?
- a simple test to see if a co-equal stop or target hit first?
- a test to see where the swing highs and lows are after the high?
- put it in a strategy and look at the results?
I intend to design some software to help analyse this and other scenarios. I don't want to write new code for every scenario so I'm looking to design something that works across as many scenarios as possible.
Also - I'm looking to bounce ideas/work with like minded people who think these sorts of statistics will aid their discretionary trading. I'd also be interested in working with the unconverted - the seekers of automated systems.
I ditched Tradestation (RIP) in favour of Ninja, so I'd prefer to go that route but if there is other software out there that makes this type of analysis easier, I'm all ears.